In Tunisian and Egyptian universities, scholars face a growing Islamist resolve to remake their countries on the basis of religious principles. Both Tunisia and Egypt face questions that could affect higher education across the Middle East and North Africa: Can their new Islamist governments spread conservative religious values and also create…

Academics can be too snug in their institutional silos. They sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result they duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. In this article, the author wants to argue that teaching-focused institutions have much to gain from partnerships with research universities on the…

American colleges have to be in India. After all, no other country in this century, save China, is likely to be as important geopolitically, financially, demographically, or culturally. Globally savvy students ought to study here. There are research opportunities for political scientists and public-health specialists, economists, and…

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources without proper attribution. Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized…

This article profiles A.C. Grayling, a British intellectual who pioneers a new model for college. In his role as founder of the New College of the Humanities, Britain's newest and most controversial institution of higher education, A.C. Grayling could have chosen among several titles. The senior academic officer at most English higher-education…

American-style summer programs in China, catering to Chinese-born students, have taken American universities by surprise. They are yet one more player in the complex and often opaque Chinese education industry, an industry in which American colleges are finding themselves increasingly entwined. These programs have become a booming enterprise,…

Technology shifts gears. The workers who control it need to learn how to shift gears, too. Workers brought up with universal schooling would respect authority, learn enough "geometry and mechanics" to use in their trades, keep invention alive, and finally see through "the interested complaints of faction and sedition." In other words, they would…

Before all the talk about "public intellectuals," Michael Walzer was one. For 50 years, he has gone back and forth between positions at Princeton and Harvard Universities and then at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is now emeritus. His writings appear regularly in "Dissent" magazine, which he has co-edited for…

In the aftermath of the devastating January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, international humanitarian groups and volunteers poured into the country, bolstering what was already one of the world's hot spots for nongovernmental organizations. But the magnitude of the disaster--an estimated 300,000 were killed and one million left homeless out of a…

The Faculty of Applied Linguistics at the State University of Haiti hardly looks like an institute of higher learning. Hidden away on a quiet downtown cross street, the grimy one-story building contains just three classrooms, along with a library, the dean's office, and a teachers' lounge, each no larger than a bedroom. Two years ago, the…

In this article, the author describes a multimillion-dollar project that aims to save traditional expressions of music from around the world and reflects a shift in ethnomusicology. The $5-million project led by Huib Schippers on "sustainable cultures for music futures" is using nine case studies, including Western opera, Balinese gamelan music,…

The author reports on a legal battle over oral-history records housed at Boston College that casts light on how little legal weight pledges of confidentiality to research subjects actually have. As a federal court weighs whether to let the federal government seize, and hand over to British authorities, the college's records of confidential…

By most accounts, the position of German studies in the American academy is no longer secure. To a large extent, that is due to reasons beyond the control of individual faculty or departments, including the general crisis faced by the humanities and the diminished importance in the eyes of the public of literary criticism, a vital part of the…

As Europe has lurched from one economic crisis to another in recent months, one thing has become clear: Any long-term solution will depend on the willingness of Germany, Europe's largest economy, to shoulder much of the financial burden the debt crisis has created. German taxpayers, known for their thrift, have balked at underwriting what many see…

In this article, the author discusses why he is not preparing his students to compete in the global marketplace. For all the talk of "globalization" as the very engine of their generation's future prospects, his students seemed far more concerned about disappearing jobs at home, rising global temperatures, and a general anxiety about what it all…